


Canary

by sikkerhet



Series: Canary [1]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27356137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sikkerhet/pseuds/sikkerhet
Summary: Oliver is the only child of a Canary and a cafeteria worker. Someday, he dreams of building a spacesuit to leave the compound and explore the heavily radiated outside world.In job training, Oliver discovers a shipping route that leads from the sky into the Church compound. He enters it and steals a name for his friend, an unnamed alien girl living in a nearby apartment.This may have been a mistake.
Series: Canary [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1997926
Kudos: 2





	Canary

On a very quiet Saturday morning, Oliver is ready to name his granddaughter.

“Mom showed me outer space.”

The first time Kite took Oliver to work, when he turned eleven, they left early early in the morning before the announcements even happened. 

“Did she? How was it?”

Kite always leaves early. She makes the bread. Her job is to pick up where the previous worker left off and slice the bread for breakfast, then assemble it into neat stacks with a slice of cheese about as thick as the city can afford this week between each one. 

After that she covers it and carts it all to the line, where servers plate it with jam or honey or fruit or sliced meat, depending on where they are in the delivery cycle. 

“It’s really, super, extremely bright. Like the sky but even brighter.”

Today, Oliver has his granddaughter’s exo hidden in his sleeve. He helped her shed it. He pried a knitting needle - one of the biggest ones he could find, in case it slipped - and he pressed the shell from her uppermost arm up against her elbow until it was loose. When he felt it click, he carefully maneuvered the needle underneath it, peeling upwards, trying not to stab it into the unhardened white beneath.

“You’re lucky you got to see space, not everybody does.”

He knows what this sentence is leading to, and replies, “I said thank you.”

“Good boy.” 

The kitchens are huge. Oliver thought they would be huge, they have to be big enough to feed everyone in the whole world. Not the whole world. But everyone in this compound, at least. This compound feels like the whole world most of the time but he knows it’s bigger in other ones. 

“My priest said I can probably have a kitchen job but he has to find out if I can still learn reading.”

“Your mother is a strong reader. You would have to learn math, too.”

When he had her exo off her arms, he asked to keep it. She laughed and told him to throw it out for her, when he was done being a weirdo.

“She showed me what the numbers mean but I don’t remember them.” The Farming compound, for example, Femtini, has to be as big as a whole city for everyone to live in and big enough for cows and wheat fields. He doesn’t know how big a wheat field is but in school there were pictures of them, and they look like they go on and on forever. “I have to learn math to be a canary anyway, don’t I?”

The kitchens have ovens, Kite explained, and the smoke from the ovens can’t stay in here with us - there isn’t enough room, even in the sky, for the smoke to be safe in here. So for her job she had to learn the filters and open them into Space. She took Oliver just above the sky, to the catwalk where the vents are, and let him be the one to pull the string. The air just goes out, she said, we can’t let the air come in, so watch until there’s no smoke left and then close it right away.

“You do, the math for that is harder but you’re smart.”

The smoke made him tired, his priest said he would be a good canary. His priest and his dad both want him to be a canary. The job is easy and the position is higher up and, really, the other option is to be an assembler like he was last time. He already did that, in his last two rounds, he figures, he doesn’t want to do it again. He could in theory be a cook but he isn’t likely to get that job unless he can pick up reading very quick. Maybe if he had said he wanted that job a few years ago they could have taught him while he was still little, like his mother was when she learned.

Today he shoves his granddaughter’s exo under his sleeves - long, as canaries need anyway - and as he walks with his father to work he can feel it scraping against his own.

“I like math.”

He doesn’t, but as his priest tells him, the way to start liking something that you need to like is to tell yourself you do over and over until it comes true.


End file.
